Help me ! I need your advice. I live in Pakistan, and I want to buy a car, something not too fancy but say around 1600CC or close, give or take 300 CCs, which car should I buy? Honda City? Toyota Corolla GLi? Why do these names come to mind? Everybody's talking about them? The value for money? The features? The quality? Can I some it up in one word, "brand" ? You wouldn't experiment with some local/Chinese car, would you? Consider yourself a brand also, why would most people want to choose you if you have nothing special to offer? Sure someone might, but it may not be what YOU wanted. Although what you can do, how much your expertise is an important factor, but more importantly the game is about your perceived expertise. How others see you.
Mechanical Engineers, like most other engineers, pride themselves in having an engineering degree, after all why shouldn't we? We spent 16 years studying our ass off (more or less). This long marathon, fueled by our desire to be "rich", "to build", "to go places", "to make our parents proud", "to drive THAT car", "to buy a beautiful house", the even harder years from grade 9 till 12, in school and college, the four years in university, we have done our part, there's nothing more to do now, we will hunt jobs, party and see how it goes. I bet we will kick-ass in the interview. We are as good as we can be, after all we can solve 4 page long numericals of Thermodynamics, or we can design a heat exchanger like no one else, we have given our best and learnt as much as we can. I suppose we wouldn't be wrong to think like that, we know what we went through to get here. But how many more of us have reached HERE? What is the population of this town, called HERE. There are limited vacancies, but the candidates are so many. Are you better than others? How do you know? Oh, so you have a GPA of 4.0, great ! Guess what, there are many others with 4.0. What about 3.5, 3.0 2.5, 2.0, etc? You can imagine your rank now. So what do you have which is different from others? Why is your brand worth the company's hiring team's time. Why should they invite you for an interview and listen to your side of the story?
For some jobs, there may be thousands of applications, what can you do to improve your perceived value? How can you try to get shortlisted for that interview among all others, and later how can you perform well in that interview, we will talk about that in this blog, and get expert opinion from successful engineers and learn from their experience. Post job opportunities. Try to help one another, find jobs, get them and excel at them by developing ourselves !
